A neighborhood at war: The Pine Hills, 1941-1945

Seventy years ago, when the sirens went off up at the Steamer 10 firehouse, you turned off the lights and pulled down the shades.

November 11, 1944: Unveiling of the war monument at the Point, Madison and Western. Times Union photo.

It was the midst of World War Two, and air raid drills were just one of the many reminders that even this upstate neighborhood, hours away from a coastline, was at war. The war changed everything, from what you ate and where you worked to how many places you set at the dinner table.

Some Pine Hills residents went off to fight; some stayed home and battled shortages and heartache. If the neighborhood was a book, you could open to any page and read of wartime sacrifice, ingenuity, triumph, or loss. Here are just a few of the Pine Hills’ stories.

The Butcher

Pine Hills residents queued up at School 16 on North Allen, where the ration books were handed out. Of course, even if you had your ration stamps and a fistful of cash, you could still be out of luck, because the stores might be sold out of what you needed.

At the Pine Hills Food Market at 1096 Madison Avenue, butcher Pete Girzone did what he could to help folks he knew were hurting.

“He always favored families,” said his son, Ed Girzone of Troy. “He took care of customers who had children. They were primary.”

Peter and Margaret Girzone and their brood in 1944. Times Union staff photo.

Just as he’d done in the years of the Depression, Pete would add a little extra food to the orders of folks who he knew needed more, or quietly cut the prices for families who couldn’t afford to pay much. Pete knew a thing or two about feeding a family: By the middle of the war, he and his wife had nine kids.

But that didn’t matter to Uncle Sam. Pete got his draft notice in the spring of 1944.

Mayor Corning was also drafted that spring. In his excellent biography of Albany’s iconic mayor, Paul Grondahl talked with some of the men drafted with Corning.

“We joked that they had finally reached the bottom of the barrel when they drafted us,” one of them, Stanley Zimmer, told Paul. “… The war was almost over by then, we were older guys with families and we knew they must have been reaching way down to get us.”

The mayor wouldn’t take a deferrment or seek a commission; he left City Hall in temporary hands and signed on as a regular grunt, just another of the Albany boys. He himself had two children.

But people found it hard to swallow that a fellow with nine kids all under age fourteen was the government’s best remaining candidate for Army service. Pete Girzone became a bit of a cause celebre, and his story ran in newspapers in the Capital Region and beyond. “Why draft him?” Read one headline. “He’s got an army of his own.” A Knickerbocker News editorial used his situation to criticize FDR’s draft policy.

A man of strong faith, Pete accepted this turn of events. God, he said, will take care of my family. Certain he was about to be drafted, he sold the Pine Hills Food Market.

Ed remembers his father coming into his bedroom early in the morning of the day he was to report.

“Be good to your mother,” Ed remembers him whispering. “Do as she tells you. Don’t disobey.”

“Where are you going?”

“Shhh, go back to sleep.”

A little while later, Ed got up and went into the kitchen and found his mom there, crying. Say a prayer for your father, she told him.

Down at the induction station, the doctor informed Pete he had passed his physical and was on his way to the Army.

But at that moment, Pete’s own doctor entered the room.

“What are you doing here?” the doctor asked the butcher.

“I’ve just been approved.”

“Like hell you have!” said his doctor. “Who approved you?” And to the other doctor, he said: “You approved him with that ulcerated varicose vein in his foot? That’s criminal!”

Pete Girzone’s feet and legs were in bad shape from years of standing behind the shop counter. His own doctor failed Pete on his medical exam and sent him home.

With the Pine Hills Food Market sold, Pete got a job at Williams Press in Menands, working nights, but lost it when he fell asleep in a boxcar. So he took himself and those painful feet down to the Port of Albany, joining the pool of day laborers hoping to get picked to work each morning.

Pete and his wife went on to have three more children. In 1947 he opened his market again, this time around the corner on West Lawrence Street.

The Monument and the Seven Soldier Sons

These days, it’s hard to imagine knocking on any ten given doors and getting all ten residents to contribute to your cause. But when the 13th Ward wanted to erect a monument to its service members, they reportedly received a donation of at least a dollar from every single household in the ward – all 4,500 of them.

The 13th Ward monument in the Point, Madison and Western, Albany.

The Pine Hills neighborhood was part of the 13th Ward at the time, and the ward had given 2,500 men to the armed forces by the middle of the war, according to one newspaper report. Residents arranged to plant a memorial tree on Madison Ave. in 1942, and in the summer of 1943 committees started meeting at the Aurania Club to plan a stone memorial.

The monument project may have enjoyed widespread support, but that’s not to say the idea lacked critics. A letter to the editor of The Knickerbocker News argued that the money would be better spent on war bonds, and that instead of a scattering of monuments Albany should honor the city’s service members by building a War Memorial Auditorium for concerts and civic gatherings. “Surely this would be a finer memorial to them than the erection of a score of tombstones throughout the city,” the writer finished, and signed it, “Future Albany.”

But the monument went up anyway, 14 feet of Vermont granite, in the Point – the triangle park where Madison and Western converge. It was dedicated on Nov. 11, 1944, with a priest and a rabbi in attendance, and members of the American Legion, and the Fort Crailo Band playing patriotic standards.

Chosen to unveil the memorial was a Beach Avenue woman who had seven sons in the service. Mrs. Josephine Ravida – the newspaper called her Mary, heaven knows why – had given Jerome, Joseph, Sebastian, Angelo, Charles, and Michael to the Army, and Dominic to the Navy. A 1946 Knick News article noted that the Ravidas had set the Capital Region record for “one family’s contribution to the military service.”

Mrs. Ravida had 11 children in all, said her son Thomas Ravida of Cohoes. He attended the monument’s unveiling with his mother; he was 11 years old and the baby of the family. Today, he’s the only one of the Ravida children still living.

How did his mother hold up during the war years?

“She did all right,” Thomas said. “She did all right. It was kind of tough for her, but she did all right. … It was a great concern, especially since they were all in the war — they weren’t stationed down at Fort Dix.”

All seven sons made it home safely.

From the front page of the Knick News on August 15, 1945, the day after V-J Day.

Victory

On August 14, 1945, when the news of Japan’s surrender came over the radio, “Everybody came roaring out of their doors,” said Gerry Conway, who lived on West Lawrence Street. Revelers poured into the streets of the Pine Hills, banging on pots with big metal spoons and crying, “We won the war!” Steamer 10′s sirens blared and all the church bells rang.

It was the same all over the city: Downtown streets were choked with people cheering, honking horns, and setting off firecrackers. Office workers poured makeshift confetti out of upstairs windows. “Emotions held in check during nearly four years of war were released,” the Knickerbocker News reported, and the city went “wild with joy.” Stores, banks, and businesses closed to let the people celebrate.

Greg Spencer, who grew up on West Lawrence Street, remembers when his dad came home.

“We went down to Union Station, me and Mom and Keith,” he said. Keith was Greg’s younger brother. “Mom went running up; she hadn’t seen him in 2 ½ years.”

When they got to the house, Dad took the chair in the corner that Greg liked to sit in. “He had his duffel bag, he opened it and he started taking things out. He had a German helmet in there, with an eagle on it. I can still remember the smell of the leather around the brim. I never forgot that smell.”

“I remember sitting there not really knowing who he was. I mean, I knew he was my father, but I didn’t know him.”

All over the neighborhood, the city, and the country, families were getting to know each other again. It was a bittersweet celebration, and they had earned every moment of it.

13 Responses

As it turned out Schenectady, because of GE, was listed as a potential bombing target by the Nazis. Fortunately, Hitler never saw the value of long-range bombers, but one Nazi experimental bomber did fly within one-hour of NYC.

My mother always bought meat at Pete’s Market. She loved Pete. I remember him too although I was pretty young back then. He was always so nice to everyone. I remember him saying the rosary behind the counter if we walked in and there were no other customers. One of the icons of the 1950-60s Pine Hills neighborhood.

When I was a young boy in the early 1940′s, living on myrtle Ave. just off Allen street, my mom would sometimes send me to Peter’s to get some meat. Peter knew me by name and was always nice to me. I was always amazed by how he could accurately cut a piece of meat or several pieces for ground beef and come up with the exact weight you requested. His second son James was a high school classmate of mine at V.I. ( class of 1950). In the early 1950′s, when I was home from college on vacations, I would stop by his store on West Lawrence to say hello and he was always interested in how I was doing. He was a wonderful,unforgetable person. I might note that his oldest son joseph became a priest and in his later years becane a somewhat famous author of what are called the Joshua series of novels,

Thanks so much for this great article on the Pine Hills neighborhood during and after World War II. I grew up in the Pine Hills neighborhood 60′s, 70′s after the war and have fond memories of it. I still get a lump in my throat when I drive through the Pine Hills neighborhood. Would be great to plan a reunion of past neighbors who lived in the Pine Hills. I know several people who would attend.
Thanks again for this great article.

The lady that lived next door moved into her house in 1941. Before she passed I would help her with her groceries or any task she needed help with. One day she asked me to moved some boxes up to the attic. The attic was a wide open floor plan but there was a 8 x 10 room on one side of the attic. I asked her what is in there and she said it is from the war. There were blackouts and they made this room in the attic with no windows and one electrical socket on the ceiling. She said they would go up there at night so they could read during the blackout. No radio, just one light bulb in this 8 x 10 room in their attic with no windows.
Makes you wonder if you can live a week without your cell phone.

That’s how the Pine Hills were when I was a kid… neighbors helped each other. We’d dig out the older folks after a brutal snow storm, heck, we’d sometimes go up almost the entire block of madison ave between partridge & main shoveling people out. Not like that anymore, these stories make me sad, what happened to this once terrific neighborhood?

This got me thinking about the Civil Defense loudspeakers that were mounted on utility poles in various palces around Pine Hills. I remember seeing several around the area through the 1970s/earyly 80s. Last time I saw one was around Mercer st in the early 2000s, which I think was the last one in the area.